On her last longplayer, last year's Over the Sun, American songsmith
Shannon Wright captured her artistry with perfect tonality, like so much lightning
in a bottle; Wright and engineer Steve Albini (of
course) found the mythical "right tone" for Wright's husky wails and
vicious delivery. Presiding over a set of minor-key love-gone-wrong
rock songs belted out as a mordant racket, Wright commanded a disc whose
songs seemed like a suite built entirely around her commanding singing.
Her singing never seemed more vivid than when she let out a caustic,
cauterized "Plea" — all open wounds seeking closure — near the disc's
close. Four albums into her itinerant-songsmith discography, it felt
like Wright had finally found her musical calling — only to be called
over the ocean and into the collaborative arms of Frenchman Yann
Tiersen.
Tiersen, who makes solo songsmith discs (where he does things
like duet with Natasha Regnier) as well as his famous film music (see
"Amélie," "Goodbye Lenin!" etc.), has clearly been listening, paying
attention to Wright's sense of directness and lack of pretense. His
contributions to this wholly collaborative endeavor are beyond
sympathetic. He plays a symphonic array of instruments in a fashion
that amplifies the intensity of Wright's delivery, matching her vivid voice,
staccato guitars, and cymbal-splashing drumming with looming
piano chords, screeches of violin, choruses of cellos, rumbles of bass,
and painterly tuned percussion. The co-billed and self-titled set may
lack the intense sensibility and tonal clarity of her last
longplayer, but Tiersen provides a warm and nurturing counter to
Albini's standoffish observer, his encouraged embrace (and the album's
slight depersonalization through the nature of collaboration) meaning,
this time around, that Wright is less the woman scorned, the hellish fury
of her furious phrasing reined in a little as she eases her
vocalizing (and vocal persona) back into the embracing arrangements
arranged around her.
On "Ways to Make You See," particularly, her
passionate piano playing almost seems more Wright's right-minded focus,
ringing out loud as Wright fades back into the huskiness of her
throat, letting her typically laid-out lyrics — "Do you touch her/ Like
you touch me?/ Do you corrode her/ Like you corrode me?" — rescind into
the singing ringing of the sostenuto'd notes. The approach, here and
across the board, seems more whole-bodied, as opposed to her
outer-body intensity last time around.
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